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Vagrant 1.1 adds first paid plugin for VMware Fusion

Hashicorp has announced Vagrant 1.1 and, as the result of adding functionality that allows it to control virtual machines other than VirtualBox, a commercial "provider" for VMware Fusion. Vagrant is a command line system for configuring and provisioning virtual machines from the command line, with created VMs being prepared with key-based SSH authentication, Ruby, RubyGems, Chef, and Puppet. The latter two packages then make it easy to deploy applications to the provisioned VM. The entire configuration is encapsulated in a single Vagrantfile making it easy for developers to replicate setups. Initially, Vagrant was designed for VirtualBox only, but the developers set out in August 2012 to allow it to work with other platforms.

Vagrant 1.1 is the result of that work, with a fully open sourced provider interface and open source plugins for AWS and Rackspace Cloud demonstrating the capabilities of the new interface. This is the first implementation of providers and plugins and the developers do warn that APIs are likely to change going forward to Vagrant 2.0. That said, the Vagrantfile format in 1.1 is backwards compatible with 1.0, despite there being a new opt-in format for the configuration files. Details of these and other changes and bug fixes are included in the 1.1 change log.

The VMware provider is a closed source provider for the closed source VMware's Fusion 5 virtualisation platform for Macs. Priced at $79 per seat it allows Vagrant users to also use the command line provisioning system to create Fusion VMs. The provider supports the Fusion 5 trial, personal and professional editions and profits from its sale go to support the development of the open source project.

The MIT-licensed Vagrant 1.1 is available to download from the Vagrant site for Mac OS X, Windows and as rpm, deb and tar.xz files for various Linux distributions.